1WHATIS(1) Manual pager utils WHATIS(1)
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6 whatis - display manual page descriptions
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9 whatis [-dlhvV] [-r|-w] [-s section] [-m system[,...]] [-M path] [-L
10 locale] [-C file] name ...
11
13 Each manual page has a short description available within it. whatis
14 searches the manual page names and displays the manual page descrip‐
15 tions of any name matched.
16 name may contain wildcards (-w) or be a regular expression (-r). Using
18 these options, it may be necessary to quote the name or escape (\) the
19 special characters to stop the shell from interpreting them.
20 index databases are used during the search, and are updated by the
22 mandb program. Depending on your installation, this may be run by a
23 periodic cron job, or may need to be run manually after new manual
24 pages have been installed. To produce an old style text whatis data‐
25 base from the relative index database, issue the command:
26 whatis -M manpath -w '*' | sort > manpath/whatis
28 where manpath is a manual page hierarchy such as /usr/man.
30
32 -d, --debug
33 Print debugging information.
34 -v, --verbose
36 Print verbose warning messages.
37 -r, --regex
39 Interpret each name as a regular expression. If a name matches
40 any part of a page name, a match will be made. This option
41 causes whatis to be somewhat slower due to the nature of data‐
42 base searches.
43 -w, --wildcard
45 Interpret each name as a pattern containing shell style wild‐
46 cards. For a match to be made, an expanded name must match the
47 entire page name. This option causes whatis to be somewhat
48 slower due to the nature of database searches.
49 -l, --long
51 Do not trim output to the terminal width. Normally, output will
52 be truncated to the terminal width to avoid ugly results from
53 poorly-written NAME sections.
54 -s section, --section section
56 Search only the given manual section. If section is a simple
57 section, for example "3", then the displayed list of descrip‐
58 tions will include pages in sections "3", "3perl", "3x", and so
59 on; while if section has an extension, for example "3perl", then
60 the list will only include pages in that exact part of the man‐
61 ual section.
62 -m system[,...], --systems=system[,...]
64 If this system has access to other operating system's manual
65 page names, they can be accessed using this option. To search
66 NewOS's manual page names, use the option -m NewOS.
67 The system specified can be a combination of comma delimited
69 operating system names. To include a search of the native oper‐
70 ating system's manual page names, include the system name man in
71 the argument string. This option will override the $SYSTEM
72 environment variable.
73 -M path, --manpath=path
75 Specify an alternate set of colon-delimited manual page hierar‐
76 chies to search. By default, whatis uses the $MANPATH environ‐
77 ment variable, unless it is empty or unset, in which case it
78 will determine an appropriate manpath based on your $PATH envi‐
79 ronment variable. This option overrides the contents of $MAN‐
80 PATH.
81 -L locale, --locale=locale
83 whatis will normally determine your current locale by a call to
84 the C function setlocale(3) which interrogates various environ‐
85 ment variables, possibly including $LC_MESSAGES and $LANG. To
86 temporarily override the determined value, use this option to
87 supply a locale string directly to whatis. Note that it will
88 not take effect until the search for pages actually begins.
89 Output such as the help message will always be displayed in the
90 initially determined locale.
91 -C file, --config-file=file
93 Use this user configuration file rather than the default of
94 ~/.manpath.
95 -h, --help
97 Print a help message and exit.
98 -V, --version
100 Display version information.
101
103 0 Successful program execution.
104 1 Usage, syntax or configuration file error.
106 2 Operational error.
108 16 Nothing was found that matched the criteria specified.
110
112 SYSTEM If $SYSTEM is set, it will have the same effect as if it had
113 been specified as the argument to the -m option.
114 MANPATH
116 If $MANPATH is set, its value is interpreted as the colon-delim‐
117 ited manual page hierarchy search path to use.
118 MANWIDTH
120 If $MANWIDTH is set, its value is used as the terminal width
121 (see the --long option). If it is not set, the terminal width
122 will be calculated using an ioctl(2) if available, the value of
123 $COLUMNS, or falling back to 80 characters if all else fails.
124
126 /usr/share/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
127 A traditional global index database cache.
128 /var/cache/man/index.(bt|db|dir|pag)
130 An FHS compliant global index database cache.
131 /usr/share/man/.../whatis
133 A traditional whatis text database.
134
136 apropos(1), man(1), mandb(8).
137
139 Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
140 Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
141 Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).
1422.5.7 2010-02-16 WHATIS(1)